17 Dec 2006: Latest Del.icio.us Posts now works again in the latest release 9.02. Huzzah.

My first Opera widget created back in July is now broken in Opera 9.02. The debugging and rebuilding process is so tedious that I probably won’t fix it very soon. A nice gesture on Opera’s part is the creation of an actual Widget API/specification for those in the trenches, but where can you find it? Nowhere on opera.com. I had to google “Opera Widget Object” to find it tucked away apparently as a left-over part of a presentation given at a conference in Finland. If you want developers to use your technology, spending an hour to write up even some preliminary docs would be nice.

After giving them a real chance, I still say widgets are a flop (at least on the desktop). Beyond the persistent storage, a widget is just a website and having it run outside the browser is a neat trick, but one that already failed. And as for porting widgets to mobile devices, I forsee a lot of problems in the area of performance and memory leaks since most widgets don’t go out of their way to preserve bandwidth and none share Javascript libraries. Leave a half-dozen web2.0 sites open in any browser all day and watch the memory usage. Will a mobile handle it?